The debate on debates: How do we get young people to watch?

The debate about debates isn’t going away soon. How, where, with whom, the advantages one format confers on a particular candidate versus another — election debates are high-stakes affairs even when the parties agree on the basic format … and lately, they don’t.

About the only thing everyone in federal politics and the media can agree on is that debates matter; they’re vital to the conversation, even if they’re risky for the candidates themselves. According to a National Democratic Institute (NDI) 2014 report, more than 60 countries have developed a political debate tradition. The report describes how debates strengthen democracy by allowing voters to focus on policy over personalities, informing voters through side-by-side comparisons, and levelling the playing field between political adversaries.

And a good debate performance — or a bad one — can mean the difference between winning and losing. Rachel Notley clearly won Alberta’s televised provincial election debate and it turned out to be a watershed moment in voter intention; it helped put her in the premier’s office. Jim Prentice’s debate performance went a long way towards losing him the election. So for the candidates, a televised debate is fraught with both promise and threat.

But for voters, there’s no debate: There’s no such thing as a bad debate, as long as the candidates show up … and as long as the audience shows up. And with young people being the voters least likely to actually cast a ballot on election day, nothing is more important right now than getting that demographic to tune in.

To get young people to the polls, we need to inform them in ways that get them off the couch. They need to get their political information in ways that encourage active — not passive — engagement, something television just doesn’t do very well.

We know that there is a positive relationship between political knowledge and voting behaviour among Canadian young people. The same Election Canada study that tracked that relationship also tells us that that youth “for whom television was their main source of information for the 2011 general election were less likely to have voted. This finding may suggest that youth who learn from more passive media will be less likely to vote, while those who learn from more active media will be more likely to vote.”

To get young people to the polls, we need to inform them in ways that get them off the couch. They need to get their political information in ways that encourage active — not passive — engagement, something television just doesn’t do very well.

So should we be scrapping TV debates all together? If so, how out of the box are we willing to get?

Canada has very successfully exported the Vote Compass model — which allows voters to cross-reference their ideological beliefs with party platforms — to the U.S. and Australia. Why not consider a debate integrated with an engagement tool like Vote Compass? If we’re really serious about innovating new approaches to democratic dialogue, there shouldn’t be limits on our creativity.

At the same time, it’s unlikely that TV debates are going to disappear altogether, so the discussion also needs to include how to reinvigorate traditional platforms to make sure a diversity of voters tune in.

Canadian millennials still collectively consume 15.6 million hours of video content each day, 10 million hours of which is commercial television. So even if TV isn’t the most engaging platform for this generation, they’re still watching it and it’s arguably still a way to reach them. If we aren’t going to scrap TV debates, maybe we just need to be more dynamic debate format to engage young viewers. In the UK this year, a debate was held between the parties’ youth leaders — just one example of how we might think differently about capturing the attention of future generations through traditional media.

No matter how this discussion plays out, any opportunity to talk about innovations in our democratic dialogue should be welcomed. We just have to keep the math in mind: 14 million people tuned in to the debates in 2011. Let’s beat that number in 2015.

Ilona Dougherty is co-founder of Apathy is Boring, a national non-partisan charitable organization that uses art and technology to educate youth about democracy and encourages them to vote. She is a regular commentator in national media, a published author, and speaks to audiences internationally about redefining intergenerational relationships and encouraging active citizenship.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

11 comments on “The debate on debates: How do we get young people to watch?”

How to capture their attention and get young people to the polls, re: the debates. Mmmmm. How about putting the debates on a channel with a maximum audience of around 300,000 and then eliminate the cross talk between leaders, thereby making it a glorified press conference (Teneycke’s preferred format). Then make it a single issue debate with two consecutive hours of ‘fightin’ them there terrorists’. Then have so many debates (in front of so few people) that they become meaningless, and the few that were watching in the first place start to tune them out. Yeah, that should do it.

Some in the media are on to this. When are people like this writer going to catch on that Harper is absolutely not doing any of this in good faith. Everything is being set up to his advantage and he will not participate in anything that’s fair, democratic, and reasonable. This is Harper’s symphony and he’s playing people like Ilona Dougherty like a Stradivarius violin. He’s not serious and none of this is for real. Doesn’t she get it?

Vote suppression comes at you in a thousand ways. This is one of the ways that Harper has apparently made acceptable. It’s worse yet in the U.S., courtesy of his American ideological cousins—the Republicans. He’s slowly working his way there.

From the article:The report describes how debates strengthen democracy by allowing voters to focus on policy over personalities, informing voters through side-by-side comparisons, and levelling the playing field between political adversaries.

That would make sense except that many, many Harper MPs do not show up for debates in their ridings. I would suggest they don’t do that for a few reasons. 1, They take your vote but they give all that power you gave them to work for you away to an unscrupulous dictator. They can’t defend that in public. 2. They have no clue about their polices because there is no need for them to have a clue. They do what they are told to do. They can’t defend that in public. 3. They are so arrogant they know they can win their seat without even showing up.

Young people would be so much more informed if they were taught that participating is your civic duty and that participating will inform you to the point that you don’t need a debate to make your choices about who has your values and who will make sure they are represented once they arrive in the HOC.

thank you for addressing this important, yet often ignored issue, Ilona. The reality is that no political party seems to really care about youth… It appears that all parties are feeding the vicious circle where youth don’t vote and therefore, nobody is interested in engaging them more and innovating with youth-relevant messages or any less traditional media. It seems that as a society, we are hopelessly accepting that we lost an entire generation of voters instead of thinking outside of the box.

I disagree. The Liberals, NDP, and Greens care about youth.
While this excuse is routinely offered for low youth turnout, it is simply not acceptable that any citizen of age vote only if their demographic gets something directly out of the transaction. That’s the Con way. Our young people supposedly care about equality, the environment, war, etc. Well, these real world politicians may not be all that and a bag of chips, but they are the ones capable of doing something about these very important issues on the national stage. It’s easier to crowd fund and “group like” efforts on the internet, but apparently terribly onerous to go to a local voting booth. Get off your asses, your smartphones, your iPods and get involved. You are adults now, and this is your country as much as anyone’s. Don’t point fingers and blame others and wait for things to get better – get out there and take part.

Someone should tell them that with all the government largesse these days to buy votes they will be the ones paying for that largesse as well as paying down the billions upon billions that has been added to our debt over the past decade.

Yes. And some have said that these are simply re-announcements of old funding anyway. Wonder if the plebs gathered round Harper know that? Try as we might, would we find all of these giveaways in the budget?

Harpo is not big on debating at the best of times as evidenced by his reluctance to answer questions put to him by the opposition leaders in parliament whereby he answers time and time again by ranting on about Israel which has nothing whatsoever to do with the questions put to him.One might consider that as contempt of parliament.

Yes, I don’t know how the various pundits have gleaned the idea that Harpo is a good debater. He’s stiff as a board, boring, does his best to not reveal anything about himself or his plans, and generally tries to play the Reform version of Mr Rogers. He’s not an orator, though he’s attracted to grandiose themes. He thinks he’ll be remembered like Churchill, which is one reason I think why they are trying to build this legacy monument to the lives lost to Communism. A shallow, ideological man trying to keep up in much bigger leagues – i.e., the real world. Harper somehow grew up thinking he was the smartest person in the room – which gives you a sense of the low calibre intellects (and musically tone deaf) people with whom he has affiliated all these years.